A Lizard Lost at Sea Makes Its Return

For nearly two centuries, Varanus douarrha was an enigma. Now it has been resurrected.

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY VALTER WEIJOLA

On June 27, 1824, a trading vessel en route from Mauritius to England was caught in a powerful gale. For ten days, winds pounded the King George IV until it could no longer hold together. In three perilous traverses, a small rescue boat shuttled those aboard to a beach near the Cape of Good Hope. “Neither myself nor the passengers have saved a single article,” the captain later wrote. “Probably they may cast up in time.” Amid the lost cargo—mostly sugar, cotton, and cloves—were three cases of scientific specimens. They apparently included one Varanus douarrha, a newly discovered species of monitor lizard, with black skin and white-yellow stippling that, at times, appeared to gleam bronze. The reptile had been plucked from its arboreal perch in what is now Papua New Guinea, catalogued in a French naturalist’s journal, and packed up to become a holotype—a specimen that serves as a physical reference for all others of its kind. When the King George IV sank, the lizard became a species in name only, a shadow without its body, and was largely forgotten.

Now, nearly two hundred years later, V. douarrha has cast up. According to a recent paper in the Australian Journal of Zoology, the lizard is thriving on New Ireland, Papua New Guinea’s most northeasterly province. Its reinstatement as a bona-fide species—the taxonomic term is “resurrection”—is part of a wave of findings made in the region in the past few decades, including a monitor with an orange-red head and one with a blue tail. Valter Weijola, a naturalist at the University of Turku, in Finland, was involved in finding both of those lizards, as well as V. douarrha. (He also helped find a giant rat.) “There was really nothing known about these animals, so, of course, for me as a young biologist it was very exciting,” he told me in May. “This is probably one of the most poorly studied groups of large-growing terrestrial vertebrates.”

Monitor lizards, the most famous of which is the Komodo dragon, are considered by many biologists who have studied them to have mammal-like smarts. Weijola met his first one at a pet store in Vaasa, Finland, where he worked as an adolescent. “It is hard to explain why you become so fascinated by an animal,” he said, briefly at a loss for words. When he was eighteen, Weijola travelled to Kakadu National Park, in Australia, where a ranger introduced him to Samuel Sweet, a herpetologist based at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Sweet has radio-tracked dozens of monitors, visiting them daily for months at a time, chronicling their behavior and sophisticated mapping abilities. In his view, they deserve the many superlatives that have come their way. As Weijola became increasingly fascinated by monitors, he regularly consulted Sweet. Eventually, he developed an interest in V. douarrha. Previous studies had suggested that the animal presumed lost with the King George IV might be the same as one called V. indicus, or perhaps as V. finschi; biologists relying on museum collections couldn’t tell for sure. In taxonomic parlance, V. douarrha had become a nomen dubium—a doubtful name.

The lizard’s restoration to an embodied state began when Weijola visited Papua New Guinea for his doctoral research. His destination, the island of New Ireland, is at times remarkably difficult to get to. On one trip, Weijola’s boat was first hit by a storm and then hit a reef. Shortly thereafter, the small craft ran out of fuel. “It is not nice when there is a thunderstorm and lightning strikes all around you,” Weijola said. “It is also not a nice place to start drifting, because there are not a lot of other islands. I have heard stories—you can drift for weeks, or even months. You can end up in Guam.” Someone aboard managed to transmit a text message to the nearest city, and the passengers were rescued within a few hours.

Aware of the confusion over V. douarrha, Weijola had examined museum specimens of the two contender species, as well as a third that later emerged. But, when he watched the wild monitor lizards on New Ireland, he was struck by the fact that they didn’t look quite the same as what he’d seen—an observation reinforced when he visited New Britain island, where both V.finschi and V. indicus_ _live. Genetic testing confirmed that, indeed, V. douarrha was its own species, alive and well, preying on crabs and insects, hanging out in coconut trees. Good news for the world, and good news for New Ireland, in particular. “It has been considered a biologically boring island,” Weijola said. He listed the local species—a few birds, a fruit bat, a frog, a skink. “Now there is one endemic monitor lizard as well, and there might be more,” he said.

The holotype aboard the King George IV was not the first, or the last, to suffer misfortune. In 1852, for instance, Alfred Russel Wallace was returning to England after four years in the Amazon when his ship caught fire and sank, taking twenty or so cases of specimens with it. The passengers and crew were at sea for ten days in small vessels, parched and blistered, until they were rescued by a passing brig. “It was now, when the danger appeared past, that I began to feel fully the greatness of my loss,” Wallace wrote. “How many weary days and weeks had I passed, upheld only by the fond hope of bringing home many new and beautiful forms from those wild regions.”

The scientific specimens that survived their ocean journeys eventually formed the core collections of herbaria and natural-history museums around the world, permitting, among many things, the clarification of evolutionary relationships, the documentation of changing climate and other human impacts, and, increasingly, the discovery and re-discovery of species—a glimmer here and there against the backdrop of contemporary mass extinction. “There are going to be a lot of resurrected species in the future,” Evon Hekkala, a biologist at Fordham University who has reinstated several reptiles, said.

Many specimens continue to travel the globe. Barbara Thiers, a staff scientist at the New York Botanical Garden and the president-elect of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections, told me that there is no official tally of how many plants and animals voyage between institutions every year, but her back-of-the-envelope estimate for the U.S. alone puts it at between three hundred thousand and six hundred thousand. Some get lost. Some don’t have the right travel papers. (Last month, citing incomplete documentation, Australian customs officials incinerated six holotypes on loan from Paris—all daisies, a few from the late eighteenth century.) Most of the specimens, though, arrive safely. As did the neotype of V. douarrha, which reached the University of Turku’s natural-history collection without incident. Weijola sent it FedEx.